Azus Notes

Lexicon is a word of Greek origin meaning vocabulary. It is a list of words together with additional word-specific information (i.e. a dictionary)

In linguistics the definition of lexicon is slightly more specialized – it includes lexemes used to form words

A lexeme is a unit of linguistic analysis that:
belongs to a particular syntactic category
has particular meaning.

Lexemes may be:
simple words
phrasal words
compound words
shortened forms

The mental lexicon can therefore defined as individual dictionaries of words and lexemes stored in the mind.

The mental lexicon differs radically from a dictionary in that there are so many words and yet they are found so fast.

Native speakers can recognize a word of their language in 200ms or less and can reject a non-word sound sequence in about half a second!

In a 1940 study Seashore & Erickson (http://pages.slc.edu) estimated that an educated adult knows more than 150,000 words and be able to use 90% of these.

Although an enormous vocabulary is available to any speaker of a language not all of these words have equal status, it is a firmly established statistical fact that some words are used far more frequently than others, and that those words used more frequently are recognized faster. This is called the familiarity effect.

Hartvig Dahl (http://pages.slc.edu) counted the frequency of different words in a transcript of 1,058,888 running words of spoken conversation.

He found that the most frequently spoken word was the first person singular; on the average every sixteenth word was “I”.

The familiarity effect illustrates a clear difference between the mental lexicon and a dictionary – in a dictionary it takes no longer to look up a less commonly used word; but in the mental lexicon familiar words are more rapidly accessed.

The familiarity effect is measured using a lexical decision task:

Lexical decision tasks consistently shows faster response times for high-frequency, high-familiarity words.

One speculation about the reason for this effect is that frequently used words are easier and quicker to find because they are stored in many different places in the brain.

Another less intuitive finding that fits with this speculative theory is the finding that words that have more than one sense (homographs – e.g. content, object) are recognized slightly faster) than equally familiar words like neighbour that have only one sense (non-homograph)

This implies that homographs are multiply represented for the variety of meanings.

What is a Test?

A test can be defined as any one of the following:

procedure for critical evaluation; a means of determining the presence, quality, or truth of something;
series of questions, problems, or physical responses designed to determine knowledge, intelligence, or ability.
basis for evaluation or judgment:

So we could conclude that testing is a form of assessment used for evaluation purposes

Role of Testing in Education

Tests can be used in education to achieve any of the following purposes:

accountability:

is the teacher/school actually doing what it claims to be doing?

information on results of teaching:

feedback

backwash:

positive effects of backwash — change and improvement

negative effects of backwash — teaching for the test

Costs of inaccurate testing

Financial and social

Gate-keeper role of testing:

effect on peoples’ lives

What is a Language Test?

What is true of testing in general is also true of language testing.

Images of language tests usually involve examination rooms, test papers, desperate scribbling and racing against the clock to finish on time or waiting nervously in an uncomfortable chair to be called into an interview …

But there is more to language testing than this.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language

The main questions addressed in linguistics are:

What is language?

How is it represented in the mind?

Linguists focus on describing and explaining language and are not concerned with the prescriptive rules of the language, neither are they required to know many languages nor are they interpreters

The underlying goal of the linguist is to try to discover the universals concerning language (i.e. what are the common elements of all languages), and try and place these elements in a theoretical framework that will describe all languages and also predict what cannot occur in a language

The major fields within Linguistics are:

Phonetics

Phonology

Morphology

Syntax

Semantics

Pragmatics

Language acquisition

Phonetics is the study of the production and perception of speech sounds

Phones are the smallest units used in phonetics. A Phone is the smallest distinguishable sound in human language

Phonetics is concerned with the sounds used in speech, how the sounds are articulated and how the sounds are perceived by the listener

Sub-disciplines of phonetics are:

Articulatory Phonetics – production of speech sounds

Acoustics Phonetics – physical production and transmission of speech sounds

Auditory Phonetics – perception of speech sounds

Phonology is the study of the sounds patterns of particular languages

Phonemes are the smallest units used in phonetics. A phoneme is the smallest meaningful sound in a particular language

Phonology is concerned with how sounds are combined to create meaning and how speech sounds interact with each other

Phonology attempts to explain phonological processes in terms of formal rules

Phonetics and Phonology are often studied together because of the inter-relation between the two fields

Morphology is the study of the sounds patterns of particular languages

Morphemes are the smallest units used in morphology. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a language

Morphemes combine to form words

Morphology is concerned with how words are put together from their smaller parts and rules governing such processes

Syntax is the study of sentence structure in languages

Syntax attempts to describe what is grammatical in a particular language, in terms of how words are arranged to form phrases, clauses and sentences and to explain the underlying structure and the transformational process

Semantics is the study of meaning in languages

Semantics is concerned with describing how we represent the meaning of a word in a our minds, how these representations are used in constructing meaningful sentences and how sentences are related and larger pieces of discourse are held together by relations of meaning

Pragmatics is the study of the aspects of meaning and language use that are dependent on the speaker and the addressee and other features of the context of utterance

Pragmatics is concerned with context of utterance, generally observed principles of communication and the goals of the speaker

Language Acquisition is the field of linguistics that provides insight into the underlying processes of language learning

Some other disciplines within linguistics are:

Sociolinguistics  – the study of inter-relationships of language and social structure, linguistic variation and attitudes towards language

Neurolinguistics – the study of the brain and how it functions in the production, perception and acquisition of language

Historical Linguistics – the study of language change and the relationship of languages with each other

Anthropological Linguistics – the study of language and culture and how they interact

We will define seven MAJOR word classes:

Some may include different word classes from these; they may also define the boundaries between the classes in different ways.

E.g. some may treat pronouns as a separate word class, but we will consider them a subclass of nouns, which we will look at in a bit more detail next class.

Differences like these highlight an important principle in grammar — GRADIENCE which refers to the fact that the boundaries between the word classes are not absolutely fixed.

Criteria for Word Classes

Combinations of three criteria are used for determining the word class of a word:

1. The meaning of the word
2. The form or `shape’ of the word
3. The position or `environment’ of the word in a sentence

1. Meaning

Using this criterion, we generalize about the kind of meanings that words convey.

E.g.

we could group the words husband, car, Idhurees, house, and Maldives, on the basis that they all refer to people, places, or things.

and words like cook, drive, eat, run, shout, and walk because they denote some kind of “action”.

This approach has certain merits, as it lets us determine word classes by replacing words in a sentence with words of “similar” meaning.

E.g.

My husband cooks dinner every Friday.

we can replace the verb cooks with other “action” words:

My husband prepares dinner every Friday.

My husband eats dinner every Friday.

My husband orders dinner every Friday.

My husband misses dinner every Friday.

On the basis of this replacement test, we can conclude that all of these words belong to the same class – “action” words, or verbs.

However, this approach also has some serious limitations.

E.g. the traditional definition of a noun – word denoting a person, place, or thing, is inadequate, as it does not account for abstract nouns like time, imagination, repetition, wisdom, chance.

Similarly, if verbs are “action” words, how do we categorize verbs like be, in I want to be a doctor.

2. The form or `shape’ of a word

Some words can be assigned to a word class on the basis of their form or `shape’. For example many nouns have a characteristic -tion ending:
e.g. action, condition, contemplation, demonstration, organization, repetition

Similarly, many adjectives end in -able or -ible:
e.g. acceptable, credible, miserable, responsible, suitable, terrible

And most adverbs end in ‘-ly’

e.g. briefly, quietly, furiously, serenely, absolutely

Many words of the same class also take on the same inflections –

Nouns, for example, can take a plural inflection, usually by adding an -s at the end:
e.g. home — homes
flat — flats
room — rooms

Verbs also take similar inflections:
e.g. talk — talks — talked — talking

3. The position or `environment’ of a word in a sentence

This criterion refers to where words typically occur in a sentence, and the kinds of words which typically occur near them.

E.g.

[1] He cooks dinner every Friday.
[2] The cook is on holiday

In [1], cook is a verb, but in [2], it is a noun. We can see that it is a verb in [1] because it takes the inflections which are typical of verbs:

And we can see that cook is a noun in [2] because it can take the plural -s inflection

[2] The cooks are on holiday

Obviously there is no one-to-one relation between words and their classes.

E.g. cook can be a verb or a noun – depending on how the word is used. In fact, many words can belong to more than one word class.

e.g.

She looks very pale (verb)
She’s very proud of her looks (noun)

He drives a fast car (verb)
He drives very fast (adverb)

Turn on the light (noun)
I’m trying to light the fire (verb)
I usually have a light lunch (adjective)

However, they only belong to one word class at a time, depending on how they are used.

Open and Closed Word Classes

Some word classes are OPEN – i.e. new words can be added to the class.

E.g. the class of nouns is potentially infinite, it is continually being expanded as new discoveries are made, new products are developed, and new ideas are explored.

e.g.

Internet, website, URL, CD-ROM, email, newsgroup, bitmap, modem, multimedia

New verbs have also been introduced:

e.g.

download, upload, reboot, right-click, double-click

The adjective and adverb classes can also be expanded by the addition of new words, though less prolifically.

On the other hand, we never invent new prepositions, determiners, or conjunctions.

These classes include words like of, the, and yet.

They are called CLOSED word classes because they are made up of finite sets of words which are never expanded (though their members may change their spelling, for example, over long periods of time).

The subclass of pronouns, within the open noun class, is also closed.

Words in an open class are known as open-class items.

Words in a closed class are known as closed-class items.

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in words

There are two main types of morphemes — Free morphemes & bound morphemes

Bound morphemes are of two types — Derivational morphemes & Inflectional morphemes

Derivational morphemes are morphemes that have the effect of changing the lexical category or the central meaning of the word to which they are attached to

Inflectional morphemes are morphemes that create variant forms of a word to conform to different roles in a sentence or in discourse, without changing its lexical category

e.g.

When added to the noun doubt, the morpheme -FUL derives the adjective doubtful

The morpheme -MENT added to the verb establish derives the noun establishment:

In English such derivational morphemes tend to be added to the ends of words as suffixes

Some such derivations in English can thus be represented as:

Noun + -FUL = Adjective

Adjective + -LY = Adverb

Verb + -MENT = Noun

Verb + -ER = Noun

Adjective + -EN = Verb

Noun + -EN = Verb

English uses prefixes in a similar process

MIS- + Verb = Verb

UN- + Adjective = Adjective

UN- + Verb  = Verb

UNDER- + Verb  = Verb

RE- + Verb = Verb

EX- + Noun = Noun

In English prefixes typically change the meaning of a word but not its lexical category:

E.g.

paint — repaint

appear — disappear

favourable — unfavourable

Thus it can be concluded that derivational morphemes produce new words from existing words in 2 ways:

- by changing the meaning of a word

e.g. true Vs untrue

- changing the lexical category of a word

e.g. true Vs truly

Inflectional morphemes change the forms of the words:

On nouns and pronouns inflectional morphemes mark (semantic) notions like number and (grammatical) categories like gender and case

On verbs they mark such things as tense or number

On adjectives they serve to indicate degree

Inflectional morphemes create the so-called ‘related forms’

Many languages have large inventories of inflectional morphemes

English, however, has shed most of its inflections and today has only 8 remaining ones

They are:

Inflections in English

The 8 inflectional morphemes of English are fully productive

i.e. when new nouns, verbs and adjectives are added to the language (or when a child learns new words) they are extremely likely to be inflected like the examples shown

In order to talk about language at this level we need to make many distinctions that we did not overtly think about when studying grammar at school

First, we must note that languages are organized on two levels:
- level of expression’ in which the message is encoded

- level of content
this level encompasses both the organization of words into sentences and the meanings that are associated with those words

As linguists we need a comprehensive knowledge of both levels of organization, because language is abstract and messages can be encoded in either sounds or writing

Although the level of expression, in principle, extends to both written and sound systems, in practice, most attention is often focused on the expression of language in sound.

Hence, the study of the level of expression of sounds belongs to phonetics and phonology (which we will study next semester).

Study of the level of content is split between syntax and semantics.

Traditionally a third component, dealing with the structure of words, was also recognized ‘morphology’.

Syntax is the component of the grammar that deals with the system of rules and categories that underlie sentence formation in human language.

Like other linguistic systems, the syntactic component of the grammar is also both creative and systematic.

Speakers of a language can combine words in new ways to form sentences that they have never before heard or seen.

However, not all combination of words will give well-formed sentences.

For example:

1.
*Copies made student a the

2.
A student made the copies

English speakers recognize that the pattern in 1. is not permissible in English; however the same words arranged in a different order form an acceptable structure in 2.

A sentence is judged by speakers to be grammatical if they believe it to be a possible construction in their language.

The study of syntax focuses mainly on the ‘architecture’ of grammatical sentences, paying particular attention of the ways in which words are combined to form various sentences.

This analysis of the structure of sentences is traditionally known as ‘parsing’.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary:
‘PARSE’
- to resolve (a sentence etc.) into its component parts of speech and describe them grammatically.

In linguistics the ‘component parts’ of a sentence are called a ‘constituents’ and the whole procedure of analysis is known as ‘constituent structure analysis’.

As we said before, the domain of syntax involves the study of how different components join to form larger units.

Yet, there is more to language than just form.

In order for language to fulfill its most crucial function — communication, utterances must also convey a meaning.

The branch of linguistics that focuses on meaning is semantics.

Long before linguistics existed as a discipline, thinkers were speculating about the nature of meaning.

Contributions to semantics have come from a diverse group of scholars ranging from Plato and Aristotle to twentieth century scholars.

Semantics is sometimes problematic as it is quite difficult to determine precisely what ‘meaning’ is.

Despite many centuries of study, we still know very little about the nature of meaning or how it is represented in the human mind.

Even with all its constraints and difficulties, the study of language is different and exciting.

Of course, no complete grammar of any language as yet been written.

Even the enormous amount of work done on the syntax of English, has not solved all problems of English; instead it has only served to increase the number of complexities that need to be investigated.

Thus, people (like us) with little training in linguistics can find much to occupy our attention.

A phonemic analysis tries to answer the question:
What is a permissible (phonological) word in a particular language?

A ‘classical’ phonemic analysis consists of:
i. an inventory of phonemes
ii. a list of allophonic rules (including allophones of course)
iii. a statement of phonotactics (environments) — which phonemes go where
These three steps provide an answer to the first question.

A phonemic analysis will reveal if the studied phonemes / allophones of the particular language are in:
- complimentary distribution
- contrastive distribution
- free variation

complimentary distribution: phonemes are said to be in complementary distribution if they never occur in the same phonetic environment

contrastive distribution: phonemes occur in the same phonetic environment where the distinction in meaning is due to the particular phoneme (form minimal pairs)

free variation: phonemes are said to be in free variation if they do not affect the meaning of the word

The full method of phonemic analysis can be broken down as follows:

1. Do an inventory of phones (transcribed sounds)

2. Identify phonetically similar (‘suspicious’) pairs

3. Compare the distributions of suspicious pairs, looking for complementary or contrasting distribution in terms of:
- neighbouring segments
- syllable and word structure
- stress
- non-neighbouring segments

4. Group complementary suspicious pairs (or triplets, etc) into phonemes

5. Do an inventory of phonemes

6. Describe allophonic variation in terms of rules

7. Describe the phonotactics of phonemes (including syllable and word structures

8. In choosing an allophone to name the phoneme after, ie its basic allophone or basic variant, choose the one with the broadest range of occurrence that allows for the simplest allophonic statement. If this is not clear, choose the one that occurs word-initially.

9. Notation for statements of allophonic variation:
(Phonemic Analysis – Flowchart)

Sample phonemic analysis

Phonology (Greek phone = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics

closely associated with phonetics.

Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of sounds of speech,

phonology describes the way sounds function – within a given language or across languages.

Phonology is the study of how sounds are organized and used in natural languages.

The phonological system of a language includes
- an inventory of sounds and their features, and
- rules which specify how sounds interact with each other.

Phonology is just one of several aspects of language. It is related to other aspects such as

phonetics, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics.

(pdf document)

Given information is information that is assumed by the addresser to be known to/assumed

by/inferable by the addresser at the time of the utterance because it is:
i. common/shared knowledge
ii. part of the extralinguistic context
iii. previously established in the discourse

Given information is usually:
i. placed early in a sentence
ii. spoken with little stress
iii. often reduced, abbreviated or ellipsed

Pieces of information that have close association with something that has been introduced in

the discourse previously are taken as given.

Also, as most kinds of discourse have implicit speakers and addressees, interactors always

take first and second speaker pronouns to be given information.
New information is information that is assumed by the addresser NOT
i. to be known to/assumed by the addressee
ii. previously established in the discourse

New information is usually:
i. placed late in the sentence
ii. stressed
iii. expressed in more elaborate fashions

The terms topic and theme are often used interchangeably to refer to the initial constituent

of a sentence which is the proposition that is being talked about.

The terms rheme and comment are often used interchangeably to refer to the part of the

sentence that provides information about the topic/theme.

(pdf document)